How strong is a PICA sense of smell?

I am curious to this fact as a strong sense of smell would have a large amount of useful traits as it would allow any of the PICAs in the series to be able to detect when ever anyone near by is carrying gunpowder or a whole host of other interesting details like their emotions or who's been where and other useful details like that. The reason I bring this up is the fact that it has been proven that a PICA has superhuman hearing and sight but nothing is mentioned about their sense of smell which if it was as good as or better than a bloodhound would be very useful and interesting.

captinjoehenry wrote:I am curious to this fact as a strong sense of smell would have a large amount of useful traits as it would allow any of the PICAs in the series to be able to detect when ever anyone near by is carrying gunpowder or a whole host of other interesting details like their emotions or who's been where and other useful details like that. The reason I bring this up is the fact that it has been proven that a PICA has superhuman hearing and sight but nothing is mentioned about their sense of smell which if it was as good as or better than a bloodhound would be very useful and interesting.

Chances are it's nothing to compare with a good chemical sniffing device or a dog, for instance. PICA's are meant to be sweet rides for humans, and human minds aren't built to process smells or tastes all that well. I'd suspect the PICA's sense of smell, taste, or touch to be all at least as good as those of supremely healthy human beings in their prime, but much better than that and the human mind running it isn't going to have the concepts to process the information in the intuitive ways we take in what we see or hear.

That said, nothing whatever keeps a PICA from having one of those sniffing devices - specifically, a SNARC - riding his or her shoulder (or nose, or knees - you get the idea), sampling, processing, and reporting through OWL in real-time. So you get just about the same practical benefit anyway.

You know, I really hate it when someone posts all the points I was about to make, and does it better than I could!

That said, it's undoubtedly true that the human mind isn't wired to handle the vast array of scents that a PICA could be designed to detect. I'm sure it's a skill that would get better with practice, but the sheer volume of information would likely be overwhelming, which is why the senses that the designers of PICAs augmented are those which would easily benefit from substantial improvement. (Eyesight and hearing.) I'm not sure I'd like an enhanced sense of touch, for example. Imagine going through the Punishment of Schueler with that ability!

McGuiness wrote:You know, I really hate it when someone posts all the points I was about to make, and does it better than I could!

That said, it's undoubtedly true that the human mind isn't wired to handle the vast array of scents that a PICA could be designed to detect. I'm sure it's a skill that would get better with practice, but the sheer volume of information would likely be overwhelming, which is why the senses that the designers of PICAs augmented are those which would easily benefit from substantial improvement. (Eyesight and hearing.) I'm not sure I'd like an enhanced sense of touch, for example. Imagine going through the Punishment of Schueler with that ability!

Well - I suspect PICA's ability to feel pain can be jacked down or off entirely. They're meant for extreme uses, after all, and it's a rare thing to want pain when it's optional. (Presumably the pain can be jacked up by some kinky PICA users....) So an enhanced sense of touch (or temperature, for instance) wouldn't be a direct invitation to suffering. It may make PICA use more addictive though.

JeffEngel wrote:

McGuiness wrote:You know, I really hate it when someone posts all the points I was about to make, and does it better than I could!

That said, it's undoubtedly true that the human mind isn't wired to handle the vast array of scents that a PICA could be designed to detect. I'm sure it's a skill that would get better with practice, but the sheer volume of information would likely be overwhelming, which is why the senses that the designers of PICAs augmented are those which would easily benefit from substantial improvement. (Eyesight and hearing.) I'm not sure I'd like an enhanced sense of touch, for example. Imagine going through the Punishment of Schueler with that ability!

Well - I suspect PICA's ability to feel pain can be jacked down or off entirely. They're meant for extreme uses, after all, and it's a rare thing to want pain when it's optional. (Presumably the pain can be jacked up by some kinky PICA users....) So an enhanced sense of touch (or temperature, for instance) wouldn't be a direct invitation to suffering. It may make PICA use more addictive though.

[Q] How do you stop a PICA smelling??

[A] Put a peg on his nose

Actually it may not be true that our minds couldn't process more detailed sensory information for smells and taste. It isn't true for sight, or at least for color.

In the case of vision, human tetra-chromatics (see, for example: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-au ... man-vision ) have an addition set of color sensing rods in their eyes and they see a much broader range of colors without any known differences in the brain. That is, the increased the color data-flow just gets processed by the general systems in the brain.

The same could easily happen with taste and smell. Our brains are pretty powerful and, presumably, the PICA's "brain" duplicates those capabilities pretty well.

I would think a more reasonable limitation on smell and taste would be more along the lines of "what's the point." Why go to the expense of building a PICA with super-smelling capabilities when all they're likely to sense in the Terran Fed world is a whole lot of bad smells? After all they're primarily living in an urban environment that doesn't worry about those odors because humans can't sense them...

JeffEngel wrote:Chances are it's nothing to compare with a good chemical sniffing device or a dog, for instance. PICA's are meant to be sweet rides for humans, and human minds aren't built to process smells or tastes all that well. I'd suspect the PICA's sense of smell, taste, or touch to be all at least as good as those of supremely healthy human beings in their prime, but much better than that and the human mind running it isn't going to have the concepts to process the information in the intuitive ways we take in what we see or hear.

That said, nothing whatever keeps a PICA from having one of those sniffing devices - specifically, a SNARC - riding his or her shoulder (or nose, or knees - you get the idea), sampling, processing, and reporting through OWL in real-time. So you get just about the same practical benefit anyway.